The Myth of Man The Killer

One of the most dangerous errors of our time is the belief that
human beings are uniquely violent animals, barely restrained from
committing atrocities on each other by the constraints of ethics,
religion, and the state.

It may seem odd to some to dispute this, given the apparently
ceaseless flow of atrocity reports from Bosnia, Somalia, Lebanon
and Los Angeles that we suffer every day. But, in fact, a very
little study of animal ethology (and some application of
ethological methods to human behavior) suffices to show the
unbiased mind that human beings are not especially violent
animals.

Desmond Morris, in his fascinating book ``Manwatching'', for
example, shows that the instinctive fighting style of human beings
seems to be rather carefully optimized to keep us from injuring one
another. Films of street scuffles show that ``instinctive''
fighting consists largely of shoving and overhand blows to the
head/shoulders/ribcage area.

It is remarkably difficult to seriously injure a human being
this way; the preferred target areas are mostly bone, and the
instinctive striking style delivers rather little force for given
effort. It is enlightening to compare this fumbling behavior to the
focussed soft-tissue strike of a martial artist, who (having
learned to override instinct) can easily kill with one blow.

It is also a fact, well-known to military planners, that
somewhere around 70% of troops in their first combat-fire situation
find themselves frozen, unable to trigger lethal weapons at a live
enemy. It takes training and intense re-socialization to make
soldiers out of raw recruits. And it is a notable point, to which
we shall return later, that said socialization has to concentrate
on getting a trainee to obey orders and identify with the group.
(Major David Pierson of the U.S. Army wrote an
illuminating essay on this topic in the June 1999 Military
Review).

Criminal violence is strongly correlated with overcrowding and
stress, conditions that any biologist knows can make even a
laboratory mouse crazy. To see the contrast clearly, compare an
urban riot with post-hurricane or -flood responses in rural areas.
Faced with common disaster, it is more typical of humans to pull
together than pull apart.

Individual human beings, outside of a tiny minority of
sociopaths and psychopaths, are simply not natural killers. Why,
then, is the belief in innate human viciousness so pervasive in our
culture? And what is this belief costing us?

The historical roots of this belief are not hard to trace. The
Judeo-Christian creation story claims that human beings exist in a
fallen, sinful state; and Genesis narrates two great acts of revolt
against God, the second of which is the first murder. Cain kills
Abel, and we inherit the ``mark of Cain'', and the myth of Cain —
the belief that we are all somehow murderers at bottom.

Until the twentieth century, Judeo-Christianity tended to focus
on the first one; the Serpent's apple, popularly if not
theologically equated with the discovery of sexuality. But as
sexual taboos have lost their old forbidding force, the ``mark of
Cain'' has become relatively more important in the Judeo-Christian
idea of ``original sin''. The same churches and synagogues that
blessed ``just wars'' in former centuries have become strongholds
of ideological pacifism.

But there is a second, possibly more important source of the
man-as-killer myth in the philosophy of the Enlightenment —
Thomas Hobbes's depiction of the state of nature as a "warre of all
against all", and the reactionary naturism of Rousseau and the
post-Enlightenment Romantics. Today these originally opposing
worldviews have become fused into a view of nature and humanity that
combines the worst (and least factual) of both.

Hobbes, writing a rationalization of the system of absolute
monarchy under the Stuart kings of England, constructed an argument
that in a state of nature without government the conflicting
desires of human beings would pit every man against his neighbor in
a bloodbath without end. Hobbes referred to and assumed "wild
violence" as the normal state of humans in what anthropologists now
call "pre-state" societies; that very term, in fact, reflects the
Hobbesian myth,

The obvious flaw in Hobbes's argument is that he mistook a
sufficient condition for suppressing the "warre" (the existence of
a strong central state) for a necessary one. He underestimated the
innate sociability of human beings. The anthropological and
historical record affords numerous examples of "pre-state"
societies (even quite large multiethnic/multilingual populations)
which, while violent against outsiders, successfully maintained
internal peace.

If Hobbes underestimated the sociability of man, Rousseau and
his followers overestimated it; or, at least, they overestimated
the sociability of primitive man. By contrasting the
nobility and tranquility they claimed to see in rural nature and
the Noble Savage with the all-too-evident filth, poverty and
crowding in the booming cities of the Industrial Revolution, they
secularized the Fall of Man. As their spiritual descendants today
still do, they overlooked the fact that the urban poor had
unanimously voted with their feet to escape an even nastier rural
poverty.

The Rousseauian myth of technological Man as an ugly scab on the
face of pristine Nature has become so pervasive in Western culture
as to largely drive out the older opposing image of ``Nature, red
in tooth and claw'' from the popular mind. Perhaps this was
inevitable as humans achieved more and more control over their
environment; protection from famine, plague, foul weather,
predators, and other inconveniences of nature encouraged the fond
delusion that only human nastiness makes the world a hard
place.

Until the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, the
Rousseauian view of man and nature was a luxury confined to
intellectuals and the idle rich. Only as increases in urbanization
and average wealth isolated most of society from nature did it
become an unarticulated and unexamined basic of popular and
academic belief. (In his book "War Before Civilization", Lawrence
Keeley has given us a trenchant analysis of the way in which the
Rousseauian myth reduced large swathes of cultural anthropology to
uttering blinkered nonsense.)

In reality, Nature is a violent arena of intra- and
inter-species competition in which murder for gain is an everyday
event and ecological fluctuations commonly lead to mass death.
Human societies, outside of wartime, are almost miraculously stable
and nonviolent by contrast. But the unconscious prejudice of even
educated Westerners today is likely to be that the opposite is
true. The Hobbesian view of the "warre of all against all" has
survived only as a description of human behavior, not of
the wider state of nature. Pop ecology has replaced pop theology;
the new myth is of man the killer ape.

Another, darker kind of romanticism is at work as well. To a
person who feels fundamentally powerless, the belief that one is
somehow intrinsically deadly can be a cherished illusion. Its
marketers know full well that violence fantasy sells not to the
accomplished, the wealthy and the wise, but rather to working
stiffs trapped in dead-end jobs, to frustrated adolescents, to
retirees — the marginalized, the lonely and the lost.

To these people, the killer-ape myth is consolation. If all else
fails, it offers the dark promise of a final berserkergang,
unleashing the mythic murderer inside to express all those
aggravations in a gory and vengeful catharsis. But if seven out of
ten humans can't pull the trigger on an enemy they have every
reason to believe is trying to kill them, it seems unlikely that
ninety-seven out of a hundred could make themselves murder.

And, in fact, less than one half of one percent of the present
human population ever kills in peacetime; murders are more than an
order of magnitude less common than fatal household accidents.
Furthermore, all but a vanishingly small number of murders are
performed by males between the ages of 15 and 25, and the
overwhelming majority of those by unmarried males. One's
odds of being killed by a human outside that demographic bracket
are comparable to one's chances of being killed by a lightning
strike.

War is the great exception, the great legitimizer of murder, the
one arena in which ordinary humans routinely become killers. The
special prevalence of the killer-ape myth in our time doubtless
owes something to the horror and visibility of 20th-century
war.

Campaigns of genocide and repressions such as the Nazi
Holocaust, Stalin's engineered famines, the Ankha massacres in
Cambodia, and ``ethnic cleansing'' in Yugoslavia loom even larger
in the popular mind than war as support for the myth of man the
killer. But they should not; such atrocities are invariably
conceived and planned by selected, tiny minorities far
fewer than .5% of the population.

We have seen that in normal circumstances, human beings are not
killers; and, in fact, most have instincts which make it extremely
difficult for them to engage in lethal violence. How do we
reconcile this with the continuing pattern of human violence in
war? And, to restate to one of our original questions, what is
belief in the myth of man the killer doing to us?

We shall soon see that the answers to these two questions are
intimately related — because there is a crucial commonality
between war and genocide, one not shared with the comparatively
negligible lethalities of criminals and the individually insane.
Both war and genocide depend, critically, on the habit of
killing on orders. Pierson observes, tellingly, that
atrocities "are generally initiated by overcontrolled personality
types in second-in-command positions, not by undercontrolled
personality types." Terrorism, too, depends on the habit of
obedience; it is not Osama bin Laden who died in the 9/11 attack
but his minions.

This is part of what Hannah Arendt was describing when, after
the Nuremberg trials, she penned her unforgettable phrase ``the
banality of evil''. The instinct that facilitated the atrocities at
Belsen-Bergen and Treblinka and Dachau was not a red-handed delight
in murder, but rather uncritical submission to the orders of alpha
males — even when those orders were for horror and death.

Human beings are social primates with social instincts. One of
those instincts is docility, a predisposition to obey the tribe
leader and other dominant males. This was originally adaptive;
fewer status fights meant more able bodies in the tribe or hunting
band. It was especially important that bachelor males, unmarried
15-to-25 year-old men, obey orders even when those orders involved
risk and killing. These bachelors were the tribe's hunters,
warriors, scouts, and risk-takers; a band would flourish best if
they were both aggressive towards outsiders and amenable to social
control.

Over most of human evolutionary history, the multiplier effect
of docility was limited by the small size (250 or less, usually
much less) of human social units. But when a single alpha male or
cooperating group of alpha males could command the aggressive
bachelor males of a large city or entire nation, the rules changed.
Warfare and genocide became possible.

Actually, neither war nor genocide needs more than a comparative
handful of murderers — not much larger a cohort than the
half-percent to percent that commits lethal violence in peacetime.
Both, however, require the obedience of a large supporting
population. Factories must work overtime. Ammunition trucks must be
driven where the bullets are needed. People must agree not to see,
not to hear, not to notice certain things. Orders must be
obeyed.

The experiments described in Stanley Milgram's 1974 book "The
Perils of Obedience" demonstrated how otherwise ethical people
could be induced to actively torture another person by the presence
of an authority figure commanding and legitimizing the violence.
They remain among the most powerful and disturbing results in
experimental psychology.

Human beings are not natural killers; very, very few ever learn
to enjoy murder or torture. Human beings, however, are sufficiently
docile that many can eventually be taught to kill, to support
killing, or to consent to killing on the command of an alpha male,
entirely dissociating themselves from responsibility for the act.
Our original sin is not murderousness — it is
obedience.

And this brings us to the final reason for the prevalence of the
myth of man the killer; that it encourages obedience and
legitimizes social control of the individual. The man who fears
Hobbes's "warre", who sees every one of his neighbors as a
potential murderer, will surrender nearly anything to be protected
from them. He will call for a strong hand from above; he will
become a willing instrument in the oppression of his fellows. He
may even allow himself to be turned into a killer in fact. Society
will be atomized into millions of fearful fragments, each reacting
to the fear of fantasied individual violence by sponsoring the
political conditions for real violence on a large scale.

Even when the fear of violence is less acute, the myth of man
the killer well serves power elites of all kinds. To define the
central problem of society as the repression of a universal
individual tendency to violence is to imply an authoritarian
solution; it is to deny without examination the proposition that
individual self-interest and voluntary cooperation are sufficient
for civil order. (To cite one current example, the myth of man the
killer is a major unexamined premise behind the drive for gun
control.)

In sum, the myth of man the killer degrades and ultimately
disempowers the individual, and unhelpfully deflects attention from
the social mechanisms and social instincts that
actually underlie virtually all violence. If we are all innately
killers, no one is responsible; the sporadic violence of crime and
terrorism and the more systematic violence of governments (whether in
"state" or "pre-state" societies, and in wartime or otherwise) is as
inevitable as sex.

On the other hand, if we recognize that most violence (and
all large-scale violence) arises from obedience, and
especially from the commission of aggressive violence by bachelor
males at the command of alpha male pack leaders, then we can begin
to ask more fruitful questions. Like: what can we do, culturally,
to disrupt this causal chain?

First, we must recognize the primary locus and scope of the
problem. By any measure, the pre-eminent form of aggressive pack
violence is violence by governments, in either its explicit form as
warfare and genocide or in more or less disguised peacetime
versions. Take as one indicator the most pessimistic estimate of the
20th-century death toll from private aggression and set it against the
low-end figures for deaths by government-sponsored violence (that is,
count only war casualties, deliberate genocides, and extra-legal
violence by organs of government; do not count the deaths incurred in
the enforcement of even the most dubious and oppressive laws). Even
with these assumptions biasing the ratio to the low side, the ratio is
clearly 1000:1 or worse.

Readers skeptical of this ratio should reflect that
government-directed genocides alone (excluding warfare entirely) are
estimated to have accounted for more than 250,000,000 deaths between
the massacre of the Armenians in 1915 and the "ethic cleansings" of
Bosnia and Rwanda-Burundi in the late 1990s. Even the 9/11 atrocity
and other acts of terrorism, grim as they have been, are mere droplets
besides the oceans of blood spilled by state action.

In fact, the domination of total pack violence by government
aggression reaches even further than that 1000:1 ratio would
indicate. Pack violence by governments serves as a model and a
legitimizing excuse not merely for government violence, but for
private violence as well. The one thing all tyrants have in common
is their belief that in their special cause, aggression is
justified; private criminals learn and profit by that example. The
contagion of mass violence is spread by the very institutions which
ground their legitimacy in the mission of suppressing it — even as
they perpetrate most of it.

And that is ultimately why the myth of man the killer ape is
most dangerous. Because when we tremble in fear before the specter
of individual violence, we excuse or encourage social violence; we
feed the authoritarian myths and self-justifications that built the
Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulags.

There is no near-term hope that we can edit either aggression or
docility out of the human genome. And the individual small-scale
violence of criminals and the insane is a mere distraction from the
horrific and vast reality that is government-sanctioned murder and
the government-sanctioned threat of murder.

To address the real problem in an effective way, we must
therefore change our cultures so that either alpha males calling
themselves `government' cease giving orders to perform aggression,
or our bachelor males cease following those orders. Neither
Hobbes's counsel of obedience to the state nor Rousseau's
idolization of the primitive can address the central violence of
the modern era — state-sponsored mass death.

To end that scourge, we must get beyond the myth of man the
killer and learn to trust and empower the individual conscience
once again; to recognize and affirm the individual
predisposition to make peaceful choices in the non-sociopathic 97%
of the population; and to recognize what Stanley Milgram showed us;
that our signpost on the path away from mass violence reads "I
shall not obey!"